According to Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the German Foreign Ministry, Open Source desktops are cheaper to maintain by far than proprietary equivalents. "The Foreign Ministry is running desktops in many far away and some very difficult locations. Yet we invest only one thousand euro per desktop per year. That is far lower than other ministries, that on average invest more than 3000 euro per desktop per year," he said.

Google have at long last opened their Android operating system under the Apache 2.0 Open Source licence. This Linux-based mobile phone operating system seems to be catching on, with HTC having already launched their device. Motorola and Kyocera have both also announced that they have Android phones in the works.

Well the old joke about if Operating Systems were Airlines comes one step closer...

An entertaining article from Computerworld...

I'll stop now...

According to the Computerworld article "the MoE is willing to investigate situations it has not already covered"...

Sounds like a plan to me...

Colin Jackson wrote a report on a meeting held on Monday between the Government ministers responsible for the Copyright Act and ICT (Judith Tizard and David Cunliffe) and the ICT industry. Colin represented the NZOSS but in reality our views are pretty much mainstream.

It makes for a very sorry read. The tone of the meeting sounds awful and I am amazed at the disdain shown for our sector's concerns.

The second NZ Open Source Awards took place on Wednesday evening. Once again a great time was had by all and the mix of attendees was wonderful.

Both The Inquirer and The Register are carrying this story. I must admit I was wondering what all the fuss was about because as I understand it schools are just as eligible to use Open Source software as anyone else. We know of many schools in New Zealand that are and I had assumed that it would be similar in the UK. It turns out that what has actually happened is that one of the 'Apathy Excuses' has been removed... namely 'It's not on the approved list'.

We see this sort of excuse used time and time again by various organisations as a reason for not doing anything so while it may seem to us to be a tedious exercise to get on these approve or purchase lists they do have their uses.

The softwarefreedomday.org website seems to be lacking in some detail on SFD events around New Zealand so I have decided to put together a list of I know about. Please to contact us to correct details or add your event.

First the Hibiscus Coast gLUG are hoping to have stands at Orewa Library and Whangaparaoa Mall from 10am to 4pm.

During Richard Stallman's recent tour of New Zealand he talked about how the principles of Free Software could be extended to music, books and movies. Stuff today published an article discussing Open Source Software and the Creative Commons Licenses. Stallman suggests reducing copyright protections back to a length more in keeping with the original intent of copyright, of ten years.

Today the New Zealand Herald published a brief guide to free software. This included a number of FOSS applications such as The Gimp, OpenOffice and Thunderbird. The list is not only open source, and its focus is on Windows applications, but it will give an excellent place to start for many people not familiar with Open Source.